Gill would have been forgiven for leaving Edgbaston on Tuesday with his head in a spin. <\/p>\n
In his pre-match news conference he fended question after question about his team selection this week – mostly about whether his star bowler Jasprit Bumrah would play.<\/p>\n
The travelling India press pack is large and unrelenting and Gill struggled to sate them. The message was muddled. His batting in Birmingham 24 hours later was not.<\/p>\n
Having spoken about wanting to compartmentalise batting and captaincy before the series, Gill strolled to the middle and played an innings with a false shot percentage of just 3.5%. The average in England is 12%.<\/p>\n
It makes it the most controlled ton on these shores since analysts CricViz began recording such statistics in 2006.<\/p>\n
England run-getting legends like Sir Alastair Cook, Joe Root and Kevin Pietersen were never this controlled using the same metric. Nor were modern-day greats Rahul Dravid, Ricky Ponting and Kumar Sangakkara, who have all peeled off glorious hundreds on these shores in the last 20 years.<\/p>\n
Gill’s innings contained just two outside edges off Chris Woakes – both before he had reached 20 – and an inside edge to Brydon Carse that thwarted an England lbw review.<\/p>\n
There were three more false shots – any edge, play and miss or stroke mishit – to Woakes and two to Ben Stokes. Otherwise that was it – as close to perfection as anyone has been in recent years in England.<\/p>\n
The pitch was the second easiest on record on a first day at Edgbaston – number one was in 2017 against West Indies in case you wondered – but Gill responded with the most controlled of knocks.<\/p>\n
England were not going to stop India’s leader from raising his bat and celebrating with that now-familiar bow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gill would have been forgiven for leaving Edgbaston on Tuesday with his head in a spin. In his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":233306,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4101],"tags":[1406,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-233305","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cricket","8":"tag-cricket","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114786411847836551","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233305\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/233306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}